8. Back It Up, Easy

Hard drives, those wonderful spinning discs, tend to crash at the most inopportune times - such as when we are doing important work, like downloading MP3s or composing English papers. CMS Products promises to help us avoid future disasters with their ABSplus backup system.

The ABSplus is an external hard drive using either Firewire or USB interfaces, bundled with their BounceBack Professional software. The drive gets power from the interface, so you don't need to carry around a bulky AC adapter.

The BounceBack Professional software lets you decide what and when to back up. You can even image your hard drive to the external drive. Then, if your original drive dies, simply use the Rescue CD to recover your system. Another nice feature is that you can exclude certain files or folders from the full backup, to save time and space.

The ABSplus can be purchased from the CMS Products website . Prices start at $229 for the 20 GB model, going up to $399 for the 80 GB model.